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1 











■f. 










This MAN-MADE WORLD 


UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 


HOW THE WORLD GREW UP 

The Story of Anthropology 

RACES OF MEN 

The Story of Ethnology 

HOW THE WORLD SUPPORTS MAN 

The Story of Human Geography 

MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

The Story of Writing 

THE TONGUES OF MAN 

The Story of Languages 

MAN AND HIS CUSTOMS 

The Story of Folkways 

HOW THE WORLD IS RULED 

The Story of Government 

MAN AND HIS RICHES 

The Story of Economics 

HOW THE WORLD LIVES 

The Story of Sociology 


Thomas S. Rockwell Company 
Publishers 
CHICAGO 






II 


Publishers’ Note 

This book presents in popular form the 
present state of science. It has been reviewed 
by a specialist in this field of knowledge. An 
excerpt from his review follows: 


“Mr. Fisher has briefly but clearly 
shown here the wonderful way in which 
man has used his two hands and his head 
to furnish himself with so many useful 
things and make life easier for himself. 
Its pages cover the story of thousands of 
years, from the stone hammer to the 
steam-engine, from the simple wheel to 
the railroad train, from the dug-out 
canoe to the steamship and the airship. 
The story is simply told, but whoever 
reads it carefully will learn the exact use 
of many words that have arisen through 
these inventions and have become part 
of our daily speech.” 


Signed: Sir William A. Craigie 

Professor of the English Language 
The University of Chicago 







Progress, mans distinctive mar\ alone, 

Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are; 
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be. 

—Browning 





THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


By 

Anthony R. Fisher 

// 

Drawings by 
Ernest Richardson 



THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 


CHICAGO 


T * 8 

,F r 


Copyright, 1931, by 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 


Printed in the United States of America 


RUG ""3 1931 

©Cl k 40589 




CONTENTS 


I Man, the Tool-Maker 11 

How has man become master of the world? What 
was the Neanderthal man like? When did man’s 
mastery begin? How were the first tools made? 

How was metal discovered? What is the lever? 

Who invented the bow and arrow? 

II How Pottery and Glass Were Invented 21 

Why was pottery important? What did pottery 
have to do with art? What was glazing? How 
was glass discovered? What makes glass? 

III House-Building and Plow-Making 28 

Why is shelter important? What were the first 
homes? Of what materials were they built? 

What did food have to do with houses? How did 
man learn to plant seeds? Who invented the plow? 

What machinery does the farmer of today use? 

IV The Spindle and the Loom 39 

Why does man need clothes? What was the first 
clothing material? How is cloth made? What is 
a spinster? What is weaving? How did weaving 
start? What is a loom? What good is sewing? 

What use is the “eye” of the needle? Who invented 
the sewing machine? 

V From Bronze to Steel 50 

What is smelting? Why was copper a poor tool 
material? Why was iron better than bronze? 

Is steel more important than iron? What were 
the first smelters like? When was coal used for 
smelting? What is steel? What is is a blast fur¬ 
nace? What is the Bessemer process? 


60 


VI The Wheel and the Sail 

When did man need inventions for moving? How 
were things carried? How was the wheel in¬ 
vented? What was the stage coach? How did 
railroads help? What was happening on the 
water? How was the first boat made? Why was 
the sail important? What fault did sails have? 

VII Gunpowder and the Printing Press 72 

What two inventions brought in the modern era? 

Who invented gunpowder? Has gunpowder 
peace-time uses? Who were the first people to use 
printing? Who invented paper? Who was the first 
known printer? What did the printing press do? 

VIII The Wonders of Steam 81 

What good is power? How does steam work? 

Who made the first steam engine? What was 
wrong with it? Who invented the first practical 
steam engine? What was Watt’s engine used for? 

IX Harnessing the Lightning 91 

What is lightning? Who coined the word elec¬ 
tricity? What was Franklin’s experiment? What 
is a dynamo? Who built the first telegraph? How 
does the telephone work? Who discovered (t wire¬ 
less?” Who invented the first incandescent lamp? 

X The Automobile and the Airplane 105 

Why do autos need a different sort of engine? 

Who built the first gas engine? When was the 
first automobile made? When did man first fly in 
the air? Who invented mechanical flight? When 
was the first mechanical flight made? 




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


“Progress, mans distinctive mar\ alone - ” (frontispiece) 


They could \ill birds by hitting them with sticks 13 

By means of the lever man could move heavy objects 19 
Ancient Egyptians made glass by means of blowing 26 
In Brazil the natives ma\e huts of palm leaves 31 

The first bric\s were made of mud mixed with straw 33 

It too\ hours to ma\e a small piece of cloth 46 

The bellows was made out of the s\in of an animal 55 
Carrying goods on oxen was not always satisfactory 61 
The first boats were logs hollowed out by burning 67 

A blanket perhaps became the first sail by accident 70 

The Chinese found a way to ma\e type 77 

Humphrey fixed strings to turn the valves 85 

It sailed up the Hudson River without the help of sails 90 
Franklin sent a \ite up into the clouds 95 

Field worked to connect America and Europe by cable 99 
Edison gave to the world the incandescent lamp 104 

The first successful airplane was made by Americans 110 
















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I 

















Chapter I 


MAN, THE TOOL-MAKER 

ANIMALS and man differ greatly in one 
respect. Man can make tools—tools with 
which he can control nature. Some animals, 
it is true, know how to build shelters of different 
kinds to protect themselves from the weather, 
as in the case of beavers, birds, and ants; and 
monkeys sometimes pick up a stick or a stone 
for a special purpose. But no creature except 
man knows how to make tools with which 
to construct things that will add to his com¬ 
fort and well-being. It is through his inven¬ 
tions that man has become master of the world. 

At the beginning of man’s life on the earth, 
many thousands of years ago, he was almost 
in the same condition as the animals that lived 
around him. How do we know this? No¬ 
body who lived in that period wrote about the 


How has man 
become master 
of the world? 


11 


12 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was 
Neanderthal 
man li\e? 


kind of life that man lived, because nobody 
could write. But we can get quite a clear 
picture of the sort of life that man lived, back 
in the early Stone Age, from the things that 
he left behind him. 

Ages ago, most of Europe was covered by a 
great sheet of ice, called a glacier. In the 
south, however, men of the Neanderthal race 
were managing to get a living. They were 
rough, hairy fellows, who walked with a stoop¬ 
ing gait. They roamed through the woods 
and along the gravelly beds of rivers, searching 
for food, such as wild fruits and berries, grubs, 
snails, shell-fish, and the like. At night they 
crept into rock-shelters or caves, where they 
built fires to keep themselves warm and to 
frighten away the savage animals. 

They were almost helpless against these 
larger animals, for they had no weapons pow¬ 
erful enough to kill them. But they could 
kill birds and small animals by throwing stones 
at them or hitting them with sticks. Some- 


MAN, THE TOOL-MAKER 


13 


times they might find the dead body of a larger 
animal, such as a bison, a deer, or even a mam¬ 
moth, and then they would feast on the raw 
flesh, cracking open with stones the large bones 
in order to get at the marrow. 

Their only weapons or tools were roughly 
chipped stones, and probably crude clubs which 
they made by breaking branches off trees and 
tearing away the leaves. Some of the stones 
that we find, which were used by the earliest 
men, are so rough that it is hard to say whether 
they were really chipped at all or just hap¬ 
pened naturally to be shaped that way. So 
these men were very little above the wild ani¬ 
mals that lived around them. They did not 
know how to build a house, to grow crops, or 
to make anything with which to control na¬ 
ture and use her forces in such a way as to 
make life more pleasant and comfortable. 

It is almost impossible for us to realize how 
hard life must have been in those days. For¬ 
tunately, these people did not find it as un- 


What tools did 
they have? 



They could hjll birds by 
hitting them with sticks 


■ minfl 




14 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was the 
first step in 
making the world 
comfortable? 


pleasant as we should, for they did not know 
anything better and so it seemed perfectly nat¬ 
ural to them. 

Man’s first step in making life comfortable 
was his discovery and use of fire. That came 
very early, for even the men of the Old Stone 
Age made use of fire. We think that man’s 
attention was first called to fire by the blazes 
in the forests, set by lightning. No doubt he 
ran in terror from the hot, scorching, red and 
yellow flames. Then, when the fire had almost 
died out, his curiosity made him creep back 
and gaze at the smoldering heap of embers. 
If it was a cold night, he may have drawn him¬ 
self close to the flame in order to get warm. 
Finally, when the fire showed signs of going 
out, he may have thrown dry sticks on it and 
noticed how the fire came to life again. Then 
perhaps the idea came into his head to take one 
of the glowing embers to his cave and build 
a new fire there by piling on to it more fuel. 

In that way he kept his fire burning, throw- 


MAN, THE TOOL-MAKER 


15 


ing on dry sticks when it began to die down. 
It was not until long afterwards that he found 
out how to “make fire” by striking hard rocks, 
such as iron pyrites, together and letting the 
sparks fall on dry tinder. Later still, he dis¬ 
covered other ways of making fire, such as vig¬ 
orously boring a pointed stick into a piece of 
wood until a spark came. 

But with fire alone, man could not have 
progressed very far, though it kept him warm 
in winter and was some protection against 
prowling animals at night. Man’s real mastery 
of the earth began when he learned to make 
tools, implements, and weapons. As time went 
on, he learned to make many such things. 
At first, a tool would be used for many dif¬ 
ferent purposes; later on, special forms of the 
tool would be made for various kinds of work. 
First of all, men would pick up stones with 
sharp edges; they would use the flat side of 
the stone for hammering, and the sharp edges 
for cutting and scraping. Then they learned 


When did mans 
mastery begin? 


16 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How were the 
first tools made? 


how to chip one end into a point, while using 
the flat end for hammering. Then later they 
began to use the sharp pieces, chipped off the 
larger stone, for cutting and scraping. 

The tool that we use today called a hammer 
tells us something of its early history. The old 
Scandinavian word hamarr , which is the same 
as ours, meant a rock as well as a hammer. 

In the days of the Old Stone Age, the stone 
tools and weapons that men used were very 
crude. They were simply stones which the 
men picked up and roughly fashioned by chip¬ 
ping and flaking. In the New Stone Age, 
thousands of years later, the stone tools and 
weapons show very much finer workmanship. 
They are carefully shaped, and the surface 
ground and polished. Some of these objects, 
of a chisel-like form and called celts, are very 
beautiful. They could be used with the pointed 
ends as picks and with the broad ends as 
hatchets. 

Before long, the makers of these celts realized 


MAN, THE TOOL-MAKER 


17 


that they could be handled much more con¬ 
veniently if they had handles. So they ground 
a hole in the stone and inserted a wooden han¬ 
dle, just as the wooden handle of a modern 
hammer is thrust through a hole in the iron. 
Or the stone could be fastened to the end of 
a stick with thongs, or it might be thrust 
through a hole in the end of a stout stick. Many 
of these stone hatchets and other things have 
been discovered buried in the rubbish of the 
caves where early men lived. 

But even after the invention of stone tools 
and weapons, life was no easy matter. It was 
not until men learned to make things out of 
metal that they began to take the first steps 
in civilization. Copper generally was used first, 
but copper is too soft to make a very useful 
tool. Then someone discovered that by mixing 
a little tin with the copper, a much harder 
metal would be produced. This metal was 
known as bronze. Later, iron was discovered. 
Iron was still better for making tools. 


What was the 
next great step? 


18 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How was metal 
discovered? 


The discovery of how to make things out 
of metal was perhaps an accident. It may be 
that a party of early men, camping on a rocky 
hillside, built a big, hot fire on some stones 
which contained copper ore. In the morning, 
after the fire had died out, they noticed a num¬ 
ber of shiny lumps scattered among the stones, 
and they found that this substance, while still 
hot, could easily be hammered into different 
shapes without breaking. 

The trouble with stone tools and weapons 
was that they were brittle and easily broken. 
Furthermore, cutting things out of stone was 
a slow and tiring work. Now here was this 
new substance, bright and strong but not brit¬ 
tle, which could, with little effort, be made into 
any shape desired. So copper, and later bronze 
and iron, began to take the place of stone as the 
material for tools and weapons. 

Here again we see how inventions are never 
altogether new; they always are influenced by 
the things that already existed. When men 


MAN, THE TOOL-MAKER 


19 


learned the use of metals they did not imme¬ 
diately make strange new tools of different de¬ 
sign. No, they used the old patterns that had 
been used in the making of stone hatchets, 
hammers, knives, and so on. They simply 
copied these things in copper, in bronze, and 
in iron. 

Another very important invention of early 
man is the lever . By means of the lever he 
could move heavy objects, such as great blocks 
of stone, that were beyond the strength of his 
unaided muscles. A familiar form of lever is 
the crowbar. 

To work a lever, there must be something 
to rest it on. That is called a fulcrum. The 
distance between the fulcrum and the object 
that is to be moved must be quite short, and 
the distance between the fulcrum and the other 
end of the lever must be much longer. Then, 
by pressing on that end of the lever, a man 
can bring tremendous force to bear at the other 
end. Archimedes, a famous man who lived in 


By means of the 
lever man could move 
heavy objects 


What is 
the lever? 



20 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented the 
bow and arrow? 


ancient Greece, said that with a lever he could 
move the world—if he only had a place outside 
to stand on! 

There is one other weapon that man in¬ 
vented back in the early dawn of his life on 
earth that became useful to him. It has been 
used by primitive people in so many widely 
separated parts of the earth that some persons 
think it was invented not once only, but a num¬ 
ber of times, in different countries. This is 
the bow and arrow. Everybody has seen a bow 
and arrow; so we all know what it looks like 
and how it works. The bow and arrow was a 
favorite weapon of the American Indians. In 
Europe it was used in the days of the Stone 
Age and right down through the centuries until 
the end of the Middle Ages, when the inven¬ 
tion of gunpowder made the bow and arrow 
almost useless in comparison. 


Chapter II 


HOW POTTERY AND GLASS WERE 
INVENTED 

P OTTERY and glass were one of man’s 
first inventions. Every tribe of people finds 
itself in need of things to keep food, water, and 
other materials in, where they will be well pro¬ 
tected. For instance, the cave where a family 
lived might be a long distance from the near¬ 
est river or spring. The members of the fam¬ 
ily would frequently feel thirsty. But it was 
troublesome to have to walk a mile or more 
whenever one wanted a drink, especially at 
night or in stormy weather. It was also desir¬ 
able to have things to keep food in, where it 
would be safe from prowling animals. Skins 
made into bags, and baskets fashioned out of 
straw were of some use; but bags were awkward 
to handle, and baskets were fragile and would 
not hold water. 


Why was 

pottery 

important? 


21 


22 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


The invention of pottery may have been due 
to an accident. Probably clay was spread over 
the outer surface of a fiber basket so that food 
could be baked or water boiled in it. After the 
basket had been on the fire for a long time, it 
would be discovered that the clay had hardened, 
and when the fiber basket was taken out, there 
was left a fine earthenware jar or pot. 

How was pottery Then men began to make jars and pots by 
molding clay inside models of fiber or bark and 
setting them in a hot fire which burned away 
the covering, the marks of which, on the hard¬ 
ened clay, became a sort of ornamental design. 
Finally, there came the idea of molding jars, 
pots, bowls, and jugs directly in wet clay and 
hardening them by baking. 

But this was such slow work. It was a great 
step forward when someone (we shall never 
know who) invented the potter’s wheel. Paint¬ 
ings on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs 
show men making pottery on wheels. The 
wheel was not what we generally mean by a 


POTTERY AND GLASS WERE INVENTED 23 


wheel. It was a round, flat, wooden table set 
on a wooden pivot stuck into the ground. The 
wet clay was placed on the round, flat table, 
which was made to spin around by a sharp turn 
with the hand. By keeping the wheel spinning, 
the potter could mold the clay quickly, and 
with much less work than before. 

The machine was still further improved when 
a mechanical device was added to it so that the 
potter could use his foot to make the wheel 
turn around, thus leaving both of his hands 
free for molding the clay. 

But the Egyptians and other early civilized 
peoples were not content with plain earthen¬ 
ware jars, pots, and such things. They wanted 
to make them beautiful, so they made queer 
designs on them. We have already seen how 
the first ornaments on earthenware jars came 
about when the bark or fiber covering was burnt 
off, leaving marks on the clay. This no doubt 
first gave the idea to people to make designs 
on the surface of the clay while it was still soft. 


What did pottery 
have to do 
with art? 


24 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was 
glazing? 


and then when it was baked, the design would 
be hardened so that it could not rub off. 

This was one of the ways in which art began. 
Those ancient artists learned to engrave and 
mold on earthenware objects all kinds of beau¬ 
tiful patterns, flower designs, and figures of 
animals and people. 

But ordinary earthenware is porous; that is 
to say, it is not absolutely water-tight. Mois¬ 
ture will slowly work its way through, and the 
jar or similar vessel will become damp, like 
one of our flower-pots. This trouble was over¬ 
come by the invention of glazing. In glazing, 
a coating of glassy substance is molded on to 
the surface of the pottery while it is hot. When 
it cools, this makes a hard, shiny, water-tight 
outside surface. 

The most beautiful pottery of all, of course, 
is that which we call china. The name tells 
us where it first came from. It is made from 
a fine, white, porcelain clay. This clay con¬ 
tains a good deal of the substance (silica) out 


POTTERY AND GLASS WERE INVENTED 25 


of which glass is mainly made. When the clay 
is put in the fire it is heated so hot that the 
silica melts and makes not only the surface 
but the whole material glassy. Chinaware is 
the most costly and delicate pottery in the 
world. It was invented by the Chinese many 
centuries ago, but it is now made in all the 
civilized countries of the world. 

Making glass was another of the great in¬ 
ventions of early man. Here, too, we do not 
know the inventor’s name. Probably the in¬ 
vention was made by different men in different 
places. Glass is made of silica, with a mixture 
of other substances. Certain rocks, such as 
quartz, as well as sand, are rich in silica. 

Perhaps glass was first made accidentally 
when someone built a hot fire on the seashore 
and after the fire died down noticed that the 
sand beneath it had melted and formed lumps 
of a shiny, transparent substance. 

Then people began to make glass purposely 
by melting sand. They were able to make glass 


How was 
glass discovered? 


26 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


of different colors by adding certain minerals. 
Ordinary river sand, because of the presence 
of iron, made a greenish glass, while quartz 
pebbles made fine, white, transparent glass. The 
ancient Egyptians were experts in glass-making. 
Paintings on the walls of Egyptian temples 
6,000 years old show men making glass by 
means of blowing, which they invented. 

The earliest glass objects were made by melt¬ 
ing sand in crucibles. While the glass was still 
soft it was taken out and rolled and drawn 
into rods, tubes, and flat strips, which were then 
cut up into the desired shapes. 

In blowing, a lump of molten glass was 
placed at one end of a tube, the other end of 
which the glass-maker held in his mouth. Then 
he blew vigorously through the tube. As he 
blew, the lump of soft glass swelled up into a 
hollow sphere, just as children today blow soap- 
bubbles out of a pipe. While still soft, the 
glass could be made into different shapes. 

Flat window-glass, strange as it may seem, 







POTTERY AND GLASS WERE INVENTED 27 


is also made by blowing a large glass cylinder 
with a rounded top. Then the top is broken 
off by heating the air within, the cylinder is 
cut in two, and the two halves of it while still 
hot and soft are flattened out. 

The use of glass as windows in houses be¬ 
came one of the most material aids in man’s 
efforts toward making himself comfortable; 
especially for those people living in the northern 
lands. The first houses had no windows. Leav¬ 
ing holes in the walls or leaving the doors open 
let in rain and snow as well as light. In cold 
climes this was extremely unsatisfactory. Later, 
long narrow slits were cut in walls, which let in 
some light and little rain or snow. Still later, 
man discovered that greased paper or cloth, 
membranes of animals, and even horn, when 
placed across such openings, made a crude win¬ 
dow. When glass came into common usage, 
all this was changed. Homes were no longer 
damp and dark. Man had taken one more 
step in making himself comfortable. 


Why is glass 
important? 


Chapter III 


Why is shelter 
important? 


HOUSE-BUILDING AND PLOW¬ 
MAKING 

H IGHER animals and birds are fairly well 
protected against bad weather. Animals 
have thick coats of fur to keep them warm, and 
birds have coverings of soft feathers. But man 
has very little hair on his body to give him pro¬ 
tection against the biting wind and the freez¬ 
ing cold. Life would be terribly uncomfortable 
if we did not have good houses to live and 
sleep in, and clothing to wear. 

Food, clothing, and shelter are, in fact, the 
three things that we need most of all. Of course, 
man has always had to have food, or he could 
not have lived. But in the earliest days of man’s 
existence he hard little clothing or shelter. He 
roamed around like an animal, searching for 
food, and, as we have just said, he had little 
natural protection against the weather. Until 


28 


HOUSE-BUILDING AND PLOW-MAKING 29 


he learned to control the food supply, to build 
houses, and to make clothing, he could not be 
happily comfortable. 

In Stone Age times, people lived in caves 
(for the possession of which they had to fight 
with wild animals) and in rock-shelters at the 
foot of limestone cliffs. Caves had the advan¬ 
tage of being easy to keep warm and of pro¬ 
viding good shelter against even the worst 
storms. But they were dark and gloomy, and 
there were too few of them. 

It was long before the beginning of written 
history that mankind began its first attempt to 
build houses. The earliest houses were rude 
huts. In some parts of the world people still 
live in such simple huts. In the jungles of 
Brazil, for instance, the natives take a number 
of huge palm leaves and arrange them in a 
circle, with the stalks stuck into the ground and 
the tops tied together. Other natives of South 
America bend together some saplings (young 
trees) and cover the openings with broad leaves. 


What were the 
first homes? 


30 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What were 
first houses 
built? 


The American Indians, as we all know, lived 
in wigwams. A wigwam was made by setting 
up a circle of tall poles, the tops of which were 
fastened together and the open spaces covered 
with skins and sheets of bark. It was easy to 
build, yet warm inside and a good protection 
against bad weather. When the tribe moved 
on to new hunting grounds they took the wig¬ 
wams with them. 

the Huts or tents like these were the first houses 
that mankind anywhere knew how to build. 
Usually they were so small that a person had to 
stoop down and crawl into them, and often it 
was impossible to stand upright in them. One 
way to make more room was to hollow out 
the earthen floor of the hut, but a better way 
was to lift the hut up on posts. That is how 
real houses were first invented. 

But when houses began to be built larger, it 
was found that the circular form was awk¬ 
ward. It was much more convenient to build 
them in a square or oblong form. A ridge- 



In the jungles of Brazil the natives ma\e simple 
huts of huge palm leaves 

31 














32 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Of what materials 
were they built? 


pole was set up to support the slanting poles of 
the roof. Then it was easy to erect a house with 
plenty of room for everybody. 

Where timber was plentiful, houses were 
built of rough logs, and the roofs were often 
covered with straw. When metal tools hard 
enough to cut stone were invented, blocks of 
stone were used for the walls of important 
houses, such as the kings’ palaces and the tem¬ 
ples of the gods. Thousands of years ago, in 
Egypt and Babylonia, brick was invented and 
used as a building material for houses. This 
brick consisted of oblong pieces of mud or 
wet earth mixed with straw and dried in the sun. 

Sun-dried bricks were very good building 
material in countries where the climate is dry. 
But of course they did not withstand moisture. 
In countries where much rain fell, tougher 
bricks were needed. These were made by bak¬ 
ing the bricks in ovens, like pottery. Ovens for 
baking bricks are called kilns. The Romans 
made very fine kiln-dried bricks, as well as 


HOUSE-BUILDING AND PLOW-MAKING 33 


earthenware tiles for roofs. They also knew 
how to make cement. 

And now, how was man getting along in the 
matter of his food supply? The men of the 
Stone Age, as we have seen, roamed around 
looking for food. Early men everywhere got 
their food by hunting, fishing, and gathering 
wild fruits, berries, and such things. The food 
supply was always uncertain. Sometimes it 
failed altogether for days at a time, and the 
people almost starved; while at other times, by 
a stroke of good fortune, there would be a 
plentiful supply. 

When the food supply was so uncertain, life 
could not be comfortable. You can imagine 
how it would feel if you never knew whether 
or not there would be any dinner for you to¬ 
morrow. So one of the first steps toward mak- ^ 
ing life comfortable was to make sure of a de¬ 
pendable supply of food. The only way this 
could be done was by raising the food, instead 
of going out searching for it. 


The first bricks were made 
of mud mixed with straw 
and dried in the sun 


What did food 
have to do with 
houses? 






34 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How did men 
learn to plant 
seeds? 


In the beginning, people did not know that 
plants and trees grew from seeds. They may 
have learned this interesting fact when grains 
and vegetable seeds and the hard kernels of wild 
fruits which they happened to drop while eat¬ 
ing their meals, as they squatted on the ground 
outside of their caves, began to sprout and grow. 

At any rate, the time came when they dis¬ 
covered the fact that grains, fruits, and vege¬ 
tables, if the seeds were planted in good soil, 
could be grown in large quantities, and that 
some of them, such as grains, if stored in a dry 
place, could even be kept through the winter 
until the next crop was ready to harvest. 

The grains that these early men began to 
raise, such as wheat, rye, barley, and oats, were 
wild grasses with very small seeds. But after 
they were cultivated for a long time, the seeds 
began to get larger and meatier. 

The art of raising crops is called agriculture, 
or farming. Before the coming of agriculture, 
only a small number of people could live on 


HOUSE-BUILDING AND PLOW-MAKING 35 


even a large piece of land, because the food 
supply was so small and uncertain. Further¬ 
more, the people had to be moving about from 
place to place all the time in search of food, 
and so there could not be towns and cities. But 
after man learned how to farm, the population 
increased very rapidly, towns and cities sprang 
up, and soon great nations were born. All this 
happened early in history, thousands of years 
before the time of Christ. Even in those days, 
countries like ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and 
China, where farming was practiced, had mil¬ 
lions of people living in them. 

But in order to plant the seeds from which 
crops are to grow, it is necessary to turn up the 
soil, and to do that it is necessary to have a 
suitable tool. We call such a tool a plow. The 
first plow was probably a pointed stick, such as 
had been used for digging up roots that could 
be eaten. Later, a crude hoe came into use, 
consisting of a long stick with a sharp stone 
fastened at right angles to the lower end. As 


What invention 
was needed 
for farming? 


36 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
the plow? 


the hoe was dragged along the ground, it made 
a shallow cut in the soil. The hoe probably 
was developed from the pick or the hatchet. 

The first real plow seems to have been in¬ 
vented, like so many other useful things, by the 
ancient Egyptians. They have left us pictures 
of their plows. The Egyptian plow was drawn 
over the ground by a pair of oxen, guided by 
a man who walked beside them. Instead of 
the handle being of one piece of wood, it was 
made of two pieces, joined together at the bot¬ 
tom, where a sharp iron point was attached. 
The plowman took hold of a handle in each 
hand. There was a long wooden pole stick¬ 
ing out in front, and to this pole the oxen were 
harnessed. 

The Egyptians, by means of their plows, 
made the valley of the Nile one of the greatest 
food-producing regions in the world. The 
plentiful supply of food gave many people leis¬ 
ure time in which to cultivate science and art. 
A part of the population could raise enough food 


HOUSE-BUILDING AND PLOW-MAKING 37 


for all. Thus it was that civilization was born. 

By the time of the Romans, great improve¬ 
ments in the plow had been made. A sharp 
knife, called a coulter, was attached to the front, 
to make the first cut in the soil. Back of that 
was a pointed iron “share” for digging the fur¬ 
row, and a moldboard which turned over the 
soil and piled it up in a continuous ridge as 
the plow was pulled over the ground. Another 
part of the plow, called the landside, pressed 
against the furrow and kept the plow steady. 

In modern times man’s inventive powers 
have invaded the domains of agriculture still 
further. Today, vast areas of land are worked 
with “gang” plows pulled by powerful steam 
or gasoline tractors. With these it is possible 
for farmers to plow from twenty-five to forty 
acres a day with ease, where formerly it was 
back-breaking work to plow five or ten acres 
in a day. Early in the nineteenth century, Mc¬ 
Cormick began working on a machine that 
resulted in the invention of the reaper, or har- 


What are modern 
plows li\e? 


38 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What machinery 
does the farmer 
of today use? 


vester. From a crude implement which only 
cut the grain, this harvester has been developed 
until today it cuts, ties in bundles, and leaves 
these bundles in rows easy for the farmer to 
handle. Or else, as in the case of the great 
wheat fields of the west, these machines cut 
or “top” the grain and thresh it in one opera¬ 
tion. Large trucks moving along beside the 
harvester catch the grain as it pours from a 
spout attached to the harvester and when 
loaded, carry it at once to the marketing cen¬ 
ters. For the smaller farms likewise suitable 
machines have been invented. Small gasoline 
tractors are used extensively. There are ma¬ 
chines for loading hay upon wagons, machines 
for cutting, shredding, and shelling corn, ma¬ 
chines for milking cows on the dairy farms— 
in fact, all kinds of machines, each of which has 
tended to make farming easier and more 
profitable for the modern farmer. 


Chapter IV 


THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 

M AN is the only living thing that makes 
and wears clothing. The animals, as 
we have seen, do not need any additional pro¬ 
tection against the weather. The first clothing 
that people wore consisted of leaves and bark, 
or, in colder regions, the skins of wild animals. 

One of the first tools that the men of the 
Stone Age made was the scraper, a sharp-edged 
stone tool which was used for scraping the 
skins of animals killed in the hunt, after the 
meat had been eaten. In order to make the 
skins suitable for clothing, it was necessary to 
scrape off the bits of flesh clinging to the in¬ 
side. Then, in order to make the skins soft, 
they were rubbed with fat. Later they were 
hung over the fire and smoked, thus making 
them dry and durable, like leather. The Ameri- 


Why does man 
need clothes? 


39 


40 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was the 
first clothing 
material? 


can Indians made a beautiful, soft material out 
of deer-skin, with which they fashioned warm, 
comfortable clothing, as well as moccasins. 

Animal skins, however, must be “tanned” 
in order to make real leather. In the manu¬ 
facture of leather, all the hairs, of course, are 
first scraped off the hide, which is then soaked 
in certain chemicals made from the barks of 
trees. The ancient Egyptians knew how to tan 
skins, and some very fine leather has been 
found in their tombs. 

Leather is the strongest of all materials for 
clothing, and leather coats and trousers are still 
worn by cowboys and other men engaged 
where the work is hard on clothing. And, 
of course, leather is still used everywhere for 
shoes. Furs, also, are much used. 

But skins, furs, and leather are too hot for 
comfort in warm or temperate weather as regu¬ 
lar clothing, and they cause an unpleasant 
feeling when worn next to one’s own skin. 
Woven cloth has been found more suitable. 


THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 


41 


We do not know when or where weaving was 
first invented. So many different peoples, all 
over the world, have been acquainted with the 
art of weaving that it may have been invented 
in more than one place. 

The first step in producing cloth is to make 
thread. This can be obtained from many 
kinds of fiber, both animal and vegetable. The 
fibers are pulled out and twisted together. 

Twisting threads entirely by hand, however, 
is slow and awkward work. The ancient 
Egyptians, thousands of years ago, invented a 
machine for spinning thread. Such a machine 
is called a spindle. It is one of man’s most im¬ 
portant inventions, and, as we are constantly 
noticing in the case of other inventions, it grew 
out of something that was already known and 
in use. 

The ancient Egyptian spindle was a tapering 
reel to which the thread was attached. There 
was a sort of knob in the middle to make it 
rotate easily, and a notch at the top in which 


How is cloth 
made? 


42 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How is 
spinning done? 


the thread was caught while being twisted. 
The person doing the spinning held, under the 
left arm or stuck in the belt, a stick or staff 
upon which a bundle of fibers was bound. 
This was called the distaff. The operator drew 
out, one after another, the fibers from this 
bundle and fed them to the spindle, to which 
a twirling motion was given, as it hung free, 
by a twist of the operator’s hand. Thus the 
fibers were twisted, and the operator wound 
them upon the spindle. 

The next step forward in spinning was the 
invention of the spinning wheel. Spinning 
wheels were used in India by early people. 
They first appeared in Europe during the Mid¬ 
dle Ages. The spinning wheel was simply a 
mechanical means for making the spindle ro¬ 
tate more rapidly and continuously. A large 
wheel was attached to the spindle by a band. 
The operator turned the wheel with her left 
hand, and thus the spindle, which was set in 
a frame, was made to rotate swiftly. 


THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 


43 


Another great improvement came into use 
about the year 1530, when a treadle was added 
to the spinning wheel. The operator could now 
use her foot for making the spindle rotate, and 
thus she had both her hands free for handling 
the fibers, and she could pull out two fibers at 
the same time. The distaff containing the fibers 
was attached to the frame. The rotating of 
the spindle twisted the thread, which was then 
wound up on a bobbin. 

Until about the beginning of the nineteenth 
century nearly every family kept a spinning 
wheel. Spinning was the work of girls and 
women, and as spinning was practically the 
only work left for a woman to engage in if she 
did not marry, any unmarried woman came to 
be called a spinster. 

In 1767, an Englishman named James Har¬ 
greaves invented a machine called the “spin¬ 
ning jenny,” in which a number of spindles 
were turned by a wheel, and many threads were 
spun at the same time. Other spinning ma- 


What is a 
spinster? 


44 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What is 
weaving? 


chines were invented later by Arkwright and 
by Crompton. The machine of Crompton was 
improved until it operated ioo spindles. It 
was called a ‘mule/ because it was an off¬ 
shoot of the spinning ‘jenny.’ Then, when 
the steam engine was invented, steam became 
the power for running these machines. Hun¬ 
dreds of spindles could thus be operated at 
the same time, and large factories or mills 
were built to house the machines and the work¬ 
ers. When driven by machinery, the spindles 
revolved so swiftly that they made over 10,000 
turns a minute. 

We must now go back and see how cloth 
was being woven. Weaving is another of the 
great inventions of our ancestors thousands of 
years ago. The ancient Egyptians, the Chinese, 
and in America, the Aztecs and Peruvians were 
skillful weavers. 

Before people began to weave cloth, they had 
the idea of weaving. You have all seen matting. 
Even uncivilized tribes have known how to 


THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 


45 


make matting. It is made out of strips of grass 
or straw, plaited together by hand, one set of 
strips passing over and under the other set, 
which are laid crosswise to the first set. 

Now the weaving of cloth was only a short 
step from the plaiting of matting. There had 
to be two sets of thread or yarn. One set was 
called the warp, and the cross-threads, which 
had to be worked in and out through the 
threads of the other set, were called the woof. 

In the earliest looms the warp threads were 
stretched out side by side and close together 
on a frame. Then the weaver worked in the 
woof threads. This was done either with the 
fingers or by means of a stick held in the hand. 
Every other warp thread had to be lifted up 
separately. This method was slow, and it 
would take hours to make even a very small 
piece of cloth. 

The next invention which saved an enor¬ 
mous amount of time and labor was the use of 
cross-bars, which in one movement lifted every 


How did 
weaving start? 


46 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What is a 
loom? 


other thread of the warp. Then the woof 
thread could be placed directly across the warp 
threads. When this was done, the bar was 
lowered, and the same operation was repeated 
with the other set of warp threads. Another 
time-saving invention was the shuttle. This 
was a heavy weight, to which the woof thread 
was attached, and it was thrown swiftly across 
the warp threads when the bar was lifted up. 

This was the kind of loom that was used 
for hundreds of years, until the beginning of 
modern times. Then came another improve¬ 
ment. This was the flying shuttle. The 
shuttle was thrown across the warp by levers 
instead of by the weaver’s hand. This made 
it possible to do the work more rapidly. 

In the year 1784, an Englishman named Ark¬ 
wright invented the power loom, which was 
made of cast iron and was operated by machin¬ 
ery. The coming of the steam engine turned 
weaving, like spinning, into a large-scale indus¬ 
try carried on in great factories or mills. 


It too\ hours to ma\e even 
a small piece of cloth 





























THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 


47 


Closely connected with spinning and weav¬ 
ing there is another and a still older invention 
which is necessary to the other two, and that 
is sewing. Cloth would not be of much use if 
there were not some way of neatly joining to¬ 
gether pieces of different shapes and sizes in 
order to make a garment. 

The tool with which sewing is done is a 
needle, to which is attached a piece of thread. 
Even the most uncivilized tribes usually know 
how to sew, as did the men of the Stone Age 
thousands of years ago. The first needles were 
sharp thorns and narrow pieces of bone, and the 
first thread was strips of fiber or slender pieces 
of sinew from the bodies of animals. 

The earliest needles did not have holes in 
the end (called eyes) through which the thread 
passed. The needles were used simply for 
pushing the thread through holes which had 
been cut in the pieces of skin that were to be 
fastened together. But the needle’s “eye” was 
invented many thousands of years ago, for bone 


What good 
is sewing? 


48 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What use is 
the “eye” of 
the needle? 


needles with “eyes” have been found among 
the tools left by the Stone Age men in Europe. 
Later, when metal-working was invented, 
needles were fashioned of bronze and eventually 
of fine steel. 

When “eyes” were cut in the needle it was 
no longer necessary to punch a series of holes 
in the material that was to be sewn, and then 
push the thread through. The sharp point 
of the needle was simply run through the skin 
or cloth, first on one side and then on the other, 
and as it went through it pulled the thread 
after it. 

Sewing was usually done by women, and a 
woman who sewed was called a seamstress. 
Sewing everything by hand was not an easy 
task and was tiresome work. 

As early as 1790, a machine for sewing was 
invented by an Englishman named Thomas 
Saint, which had some of the parts that we see 
in a sewing machine today. In 1830, a French¬ 
man named Thimonier built a better machine. 


THE SPINDLE AND THE LOOM 


49 


It was not until 1846, however, when Elias 
Howe, an American, patented a new and im¬ 
proved machine, that the real history of the who invented the 
sewing machine begins. In Howe’s machine sewtn s machine? 
the needle, which was curved, had the eye near 
the point, and it made a lock-stitch by means of 
a shuttle on the other side of the cloth, the 
needle working horizontally. 

Other inventors made various improvements, 
and in 1851, a man named Isaac M. Singer 
brought out a machine operating with a ver¬ 
tical needle and with power supplied by a foot 
treadle. 

These early machines could do only simple 
stitching. Since then, machines have been built 
with special attachments for doing all sorts 
of sewing, such as embroidery, buttonhole-mak¬ 
ing, hemming, tucking, and darning. Ma¬ 
chines also have been made for sewing leather 
and carpet. The machine for sewing leather 
was a great help in shoemaking. Many sew¬ 
ing machines nowadays are run by electricity. 


Chapter V 


What is 
smelting? 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 
I WE have already noticed, man probably 



J- first learned the use of metals by accident, 
from the melting of copper out of rocks on 
which fires had been built. In some parts of 
the world, however, copper is found in an al¬ 
most pure state. The Indians living near Lake 
Superior used to pick up pieces of this natural 
copper and hammer it into hatchets, knives, 
and ornaments. But most copper has to be 
melted out of rocks before it can be fashioned 
into things that are useful. 

This getting of metal out of rock is called 
smelting. Copper was an easy metal to smelt. 
The metal, while soft, could then be hammered 
into tools and weapons; or while still liquid, 
it could be poured into molds of stone which 
had been cut into the right shape. Then, when 


What is 
smelting? 


SO 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 


51 


the metal had cooled and hardened, the differ¬ 
ent objects could be lifted out. 

The trouble with copper was that it did not 
have sufficient hardness and strength to make 
strong tools and weapons, and the sharp edges 
dulled quickly. But after a while somebody 
discovered that by adding about one-ninth part 
of melted tin to the melted copper and thor¬ 
oughly mixing them, a very much harder and 
stronger metal was produced. We call this 
mixed metal bronze . Bronze served the pur¬ 
pose so well that for many hundreds of years 
nearly all the tools and weapons were made of 
it. We speak of that time as the Bronze Age. 

About the same time, man also discovered 
iron, but it was not much used then. 

There were a number of reasons for this. 
Iron was harder and stronger than other metals, 
but in most parts of the world it was difficult 
to break the ore out of the surrounding rocks. 
In order to melt the ore a very hot fire was 
necessary, which required a great deal of fuel 


Why was 
copper a poor 
tool material? 


52 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Why was iron 
better than 
bronze? 


and had to be built in a stone furnace of special 
construction. Furthermore, most iron was full 
of impurities; it was hard to get these out, and 
if they were not taken out, the iron was not 
of much use. 

But iron, when properly smelted, was vastly 
superior to bronze. It was so much harder 
and stronger, and could be given a so much 
sharper edge (especially in the form of steel), 
that the people who used iron tools and 
weapons would have a great advantage. 

The widespread use of iron seems to have 
started with the ancient Egyptians. One reason 
for this may have been the fact that Africa, 
unlike Europe, was rich in deposits of a fine 
quality of iron that was easy to get out of the 
ground. Pieces of iron have been found in 
the pyramids of Egypt. The Egyptians also 
learned how to make steel. 

Gradually the use of bronze for the more 
important tools and weapons was given up, 
and iron took its place. A great step forward 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 


53 


was taken in the history of making the world 
comfortable when the Bronze Age ended and 
the Iron Age began. The American Indians 
never learned the use of iron. Even the Aztecs 
and the Peruvians were still using copper when 
Columbus discovered America. 

Without the special kind of iron which we 
know as steel, the modern world could not 
have been born. Our great civilization of today 
is literally built on a foundation of steel. Steel 
is a much finer metal than ordinary iron. It 
is stronger and more elastic; it is not so brittle, 
and therefore it can stand a much heavier strain. 
And of course it takes a much sharper edge. 
Swords made of the famous Damascus steel, 
hundreds of years ago, were so finely “tem¬ 
pered” that they could sever a delicate hair 
hanging in the air. 

Steel is made by taking the impurities out 
of iron and adding a little carbon and small 
quantities of certain other substances. Steel¬ 
making was a slow and expensive operation 


Is steel more 
important 
than iron? 


54 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What were the 
first smelters 

like? 


until modern times. Then science came to the 
aid of industry and devised quicker and cheaper 
ways of making steel. Just how this was done, 
we shall see later. 

As we have seen, for the smelting of iron, 
the ore had to be heated so hot that an ordinary 
fire was not sufficient. A special furnace had 
to be built. The earliest furnaces were made 
by digging a hole in a hillside and filling it 
with dry wood, on which the ore was placed. 
The hole was covered over, except for an open¬ 
ing left in the top through which the hot gases 
(from impurities in the iron) and the smoke 
could escape into the air. There was another 
opening at the bottom, so that a draft would 
blow through the furnace and make it hotter. 

Then some “Thomas A. Edison” of the 
ancient world invented an artificial furnace for 
making iron. It was built of stones on the 
surface of the ground, so that it was no longer 
necessary to go to some hillside and dig into it. 
A strong blast of air was blown upon the fire 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 


55 


with a bellows. The bellows was a bag made 
out of the skin of some animal, such as a goat. 
It was filled with air and then pressed down, 
the air being forced violently out through a 
small hole. 

Later, instead of wood, charcoal was used in 
smelting iron. But it took so much wood to 
make enough charcoal to run an iron furnace 
that iron smelting could not be done on a large 
scale until modern times, when coal came into 
use. Coke, which is obtained from coal, makes 
an extremely hot fire. Where there were great 
coal mines near good supplies of iron ore, iron 
and also steel could be produced in immense 
quantities at a low cost. 

The iron that was used by the Egyptians, 
the Greeks, the Romans, and in Europe down 
into the Middle Ages, was wrought iron; that 
is, iron which, while still hot and fairly soft, 
was hammered into different shapes. Cast iron, 
which is iron poured into molds while still 
liquid, was made in very early times by the 


The bellows was a bag 
made out of the s\in of 
some animal 


When was 
coal used for 
smelting? 











56 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What is 
steel? 


Chinese, but it did not appear in Europe until 
the fourteenth century. In order to make cast 
iron, a very high temperature is required. But 
cast iron is brittle and is not nearly so useful 
as steel. We must now look a little more closely 
into the making of steel. 

Steel, as we have already noticed, is a com¬ 
bination of iron and carbon, together with very 
small quantities of other substances, such as 
silicon, manganese, sulphur, and phosphorus. 
The hardness of the steel is determined by the 
amount of carbon in it. There are also many 
special kinds of steel, made by combining other 
substances. 

The steel that was made by the people of the 
ancient world was simply “tempered” iron. 
The iron while being smelted absorbed a certain 
amount of carbon from the burning charcoal. 
Then the iron was made into the desired shape, 
and, while still red hot, it was plunged into a 
bath of cold water, which gave it the qualities 
of steel. This was called “tempering.” 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 


57 


It was not until the beginning of modern 
times that real improvements began to be made 
in the manufacture of steel. First, the blast What is a 
furnace was invented. In the blast furnace a blast i urnace? 
quantity of limestone was added to the char¬ 
coal and iron ore. Then, when the ore was 
melted in the strong heat, the impurities in 
the iron would combine with the limestone and 
melt, forming what is called a slag. The melted 
iron, being heavier than the slag, would run 
down to the bottom of the furnace and the slag 
would float on top. 

The greatest difficulty in making iron and 
steel has been to get the impurities out, for iron 
ore is generally filled with all kinds of base 
substances that if not removed would make the 
iron almost worthless. Steel, particularly that 
used in making railroad rails, which have to 
stand a great strain, must be free from impuri¬ 
ties. So the matter of getting out the impurities 
has been a serious problem. 

In 1740, Robert Huntsman, in England, 


58 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What is the 

Bessemer 

process? 


produced the first crucible steel. The crude 
metal was placed in clay crucibles, melted, and 
refined. Fine steel was made in the crucibles, 
suitable for tools that required great hardness, 
a high polish, or sharp edges. Such steel, which 
is comparatively small in amount, is still made 
by the crucible method. 

An important new method of steel-making 
appeared in about 1850. It was invented in 
the United States by a man named Kelly, and 
in England by a man named Bessemer, each 
working independently. It is generally known 
as the Bessemer process. It greatly shortened 
the time necessary for taking out impurities. 
For this process, huge containers called con¬ 
verters, with open tops, are used. They look 
something like enormous barrels held up by 
posts at the sides. A stream of air which is 
forced through the liquid metal carries away 
the impurities. 

About the same time there came into use the 
Open Hearth process. The ideas from which 


FROM BRONZE TO STEEL 


59 


it sprang were worked out by Sir William 
Siemens in England and by two brothers, P. 
and E. Martin, in France. The crude metal is 
placed in a furnace, the bed of which is lined 
with chemicals, and then a gas flame of terrific 
heat is sprayed over the surface. 

Our age has been called the Age of Steel. 
This is quite true, for modern civilization rests 
on machinery. Most of this machinery is made 
of steel, just as are the skeletons of our great 
skyscraper buildings, our huge bridges, all kinds 
of tools and implements, and rails for our 
railroads. 

Without the production of great quantities 
of steel, quickly and cheaply, the kind of world 
that we live in today, with all its comforts 
and conveniences, would be impossible. And 
Mother Nature has been kind to us; she has 
put into the earth such generous supplies of 
iron and coal that we need have no fear that 
they will all be used up in the near future. 


What is the 
Open Hearth 
process? 


Chapter VI 


Why did man 
need inventions 
for moving? 


THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 

O NE of the greater problems confronting 
early man in his effort to make the world 
more comfortable, was how to travel rapidly 
from place to place, and also how to move things 
from one place to another with the least effort. 

In the matter of getting quickly from one 
place to another, by his own natural power, 
man was not nearly so well off as many animals. 
The horse and the deer, for instance, could run 
faster than he, fishes and even some of the 
land animals could swim better than he, and 
the birds could fly—which man could not do 
at all! 

When man succeeded in taming horses, he 
could climb on their backs and thus travel much 
more swiftly and for longer distances than he 
could when he depended on his own legs to 


60 


THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 


61 


carry him. But riding on horseback, especially 
for a long distance, was uncomfortable and 
sometimes impossible. 

For carrying goods, also, one could use ani¬ 
mals such as horses, donkeys, oxen, and camels. 
But this was not always satisfactory, for the 
goods had to be strapped to the animal’s back 
and were liable to fall off and get damaged. 
Of course the goods might be piled on rough 
sledges and dragged over the ground, but the 
sledges were apt to get stuck. 

The first step in solving the problem of trans¬ 
portation on land came with the invention of 
the wheel. We are all so familiar with wheels 
of many kinds that we do not realize what a 
wonderful thing a wheel is. It is another of 
the great basic inventions that have made 
civilization possible. 

As with other great inventions, the wheel 
was not suddenly born out of nothing in the 
head of some great genius. We can easily see 
how it evolved or grew. When a group of men 


Carrying goods on oxen was 
not always satisfactory 


How were 
things carried? 




«—F 




62 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How was the 
wheel invented? 


were trying to move a heavy object, such as a 
block of stone, over the ground, the idea prob¬ 
ably occurred to one of them, perhaps after the 
block of stone had got stuck, to chop down 
some young trees, tear off the leaves and 
branches, and lay the trunks on the ground 
under the stone. Then it was easy to push the 
stone along. The poles simply rolled over and 
over, and when one of the poles was left behind 
by the moving stone it could be carried to the 
front again. 

Then another idea popped into the head of 
some man. He took a large tree trunk, cut 
off the branches and scraped away the bark, 
so as to make the outside very smooth, and 
chopped it into a length of about five feet. He 
cut away the middle part, leaving only a narrow 
connection between the two large, circular ends. 
These ends served as crude wheels. Between 
these wheel-like ends he could then place a 
great wooden box, fastening it so the primitive 
axle could rotate beneath the bottom of the 


THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 


63 


box. He then had a rude cart. This cart 
could be very easily pulled over the ground. 

Another improvement was made when the 
wheels were cut separately, each with a hole in 
the middle. Then two wheels were fastened 
together, one to each end of a pole or axle, which 
remained fixed in position and the wheels 
revolved around it. Still later, the manner of 
building a wheel was further changed. A 
strong, circular rim of wood was constructed 
and connected by means of stout spokes to a 
hub in the middle; that is, a small wooden 
object shaped like a keg, with a hole for the 
axle to go through. To the outside of the rim 
was fastened a metal tire to save wear. 

Until the invention of railroads, about one 
hundred years ago, the wheeled carriage was 
the best means that the world had for carrying 
people and goods on land. 

Carriages were first built so long ago that 
we do not know when they first appeared. Even 
so ancient a people as the early Egyptians knew 


How was the 
wheel improved? 


64 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was a 
stagecoach? 


how to make beautiful chariots, some of which 
have been found, well preserved, in the tombs 
of their kings. The Romans, too, made hand¬ 
some chariots, drawn by swift horses. The 
Romans were fond of holding chariot races. 

There have been various forms of wheeled 
carriages. Before the coming of the railroads, 
people used to travel long distances in stage¬ 
coaches. Stagecoaches were a familiar sight in 
the western part of the United States until 
comparatively recent times. 

A stagecoach was a large, high carriage, 
capable of carrying quite a number of people, 
together with their baggage, and also the mails. 
It was drawn by four or even six horses. It 
was called a stagecoach because it was drawn 
by different sets of horses, each set pulling it a 
certain distance, or stage. One set of horses 
would pull the coach for a number of miles until 
it reached the next town or city, where a new 
set of horses would be waiting. Then the tired 
horses would be unhitched and fresh ones 


THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 


65 


harnessed in, and these would pull the coach at 
a fast speed to the next stopping place, where 
another relay of horses would be waiting, and 
so on. In that way, the coach could travel 
swiftly for hundreds of miles. 

Of course when the railroads came, both the 
engines (locomotives) and the cars needed 
wheels. The wheels of railroad cars have to 
be very strong to bear up the immense weight 
of the cars; and it was found to be better to 
have the axles turn with the wheels instead of 
being fixed. Railroad trains made traveling 
on land much speedier and more comfortable 
than it had ever been before. Instead of moving 
over the bare ground, the wheels were placed 
on smooth steel rails, so that the train sped along 
without jolting. 

A different kind of car was built for carrying 
merchandise, and these cars were hauled in long 
trains called freight trains. These trains could 
carry immense loads of all kinds of material 
as far as necessary. Before the invention of 


How did 
railroads 
help? 


66 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was 
happening 
on the water? 


railroads, transportation on land was so expen¬ 
sive that only light and costly goods could be 
shipped any great distance. 

The building of railroads was made possible, 
of course, by the invention of the steam engine, 
of which we shall have more to say in another 
chapter. It was not until long after the railroads 
had been serving mankind that the automobile 
and the airplane were invented. These two 
wonderful inventions have still further increased 
man’s ability to move from place to place 
quickly and comfortably. 

In the meantime, how was man solving the 
problem of moving himself and his belongings 
over the water? 

The first boat was undoubtedly a floating 
log. By sitting astride the log and pushing 
against the water with his legs and arms, or 
paddling with a stick, a man could cross a river 
or a lake, or reach some island off the coast. 

But solid logs were heavy and hard to 
manage. It was difficult to stay on them, and 


The first boats were logs hollowed out by 
burning and hacking 
67 










68 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How was 
first boat 
made? 


still more difficult to carry any baggage on them. 
So somebody hit upon the idea of making the 
the log hollow. This was done by burning and 
hacking out with a hatchet a large hole extend¬ 
ing nearly the entire length of the log. Then 
it was found that by chopping the ends of the 
log into points it would move through the water 
more easily. 

Tribes in many parts of the world have been 
very skillful in building these “dugout” canoes. 
They could move very swiftly through the 
water by means of paddles plied by the men 
sitting in them. Columbus, on one of his 
voyages, saw in the waters of the West Indies 
“dugout” canoes large enough to contain 
seventy or eighty persons. 

But it was not always easy to find good tree 
trunks of just the right quality and size. Fur¬ 
thermore, hollowing them out was slow and 
painful work. As time went on, it was found 
that a much better boat could be built by 
fashioning a keel and a number of “ribs” of 


THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 


69 


wood and then nailing boards upon them. The 
new boat was widest in the middle and tapered 
at both ends. It was steered by means of a 
rudder at the stern, and it was pushed through 
the water by oars. 

These boats were far better than the old 
“dugouts.” But when a boat was heavily loaded 
or had to make a long journey, rowing was not 
equal to the job, because it was very hard work 
and the rowers quickly got tired. Transporta¬ 
tion on water would never have progressed very 
far had it not been for the sail. 

The idea of the sail probably was born when 
a man in a little boat stood up and held part of 
his blanket out against the breeze. The wind, 
striking the broad surface of the blanket, pushed How was the 
the boat along through the water without any satl tnvented? 
effort on the part of the man. If it was a sharp 
breeze, the boat was pushed by the wind much 
more swiftly than the man could row or paddle. 

From this, it was an easy step to stick a tall 
pole into the middle of the boat and fasten to 


70 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Why was the 
sail important? 



the pole a cross-piece of wood to which was 
attached a large sheet of cloth, the ends of 
which were tied to the bottom of the mast or 
to some other part of the boat. 

With the help of one or more sails, boats of 
very large size, covered over with decks and 
filled with heavy cargoes of merchandise, could 
travel over the water for long distances without 
any physical labor of human beings, except for 
the work of managing the sails and steering. 
Power that comes from the winds costs nothing, 
and so water transportation was very much 
cheaper than transportation on land, especially 
since a boat could carry more people and goods 
than even the largest carriages or wagons. Cities 
and towns were built close to harbors or deep 
rivers, so that the ships had no difficulty in 
reaching them to load or discharge cargoes. 

It was in stout sailing vessels that brave men 
sailed around Africa, that the Norsemen and 
Columbus crossed the stormy Atlantic, and that 
the Pilgrims and thousands of other early pio- 


A blanket perhaps became 
the first sail by accident 





THE WHEEL AND THE SAIL 


71 


neers came from Europe to America in order 
to make their homes here. 

The chief trouble of sailboats, of course, was 
that the winds were not always dependable. 
Sometimes they blew the wrong way, and some¬ 
times they died down altogether and left the 
ship becalmed. 

After the invention of the steam engine, 
steam began to be substituted for sails on large 
ships. First, paddle-wheels were built on the 
sides of the ships. But they were very awkward, 
and soon were replaced by propellers built into 
the end of the ship next to the rudder and under 
the water line. The engines of many ships today 
are run by oil, so that the ship does not have 
to carry immense loads of sooty coal to feed the 
powerful engines. 

A swift steamship now crosses the Atlantic 
in less than five days—a voyage that took 
Columbus two months. 


What fault 
did sails have? 


Chapter VII 


GUNPOWDER AND THE 
PRINTING PRESS 


What two 
inventions 
brought in the 
Modern Era? 


D URING the time called the Middle Ages 
people were still living in much the same 
way that they had lived for thousands of years. 
There were few of the comforts that everybody 
enjoys today, and for most people, life was very 
hard. Then there appeared in Europe two 
great inventions which had such a wonderful 
effect upon the world that the Middle Ages 
ended and a new era began—the modern era 
in which we are now living. 

These two inventions were very different 
things: one was gunpowder, and the other was 
the printing press. Strange as it may seem, both 
gunpowder and printing were first invented in 
China hundreds of years earlier. But they 
effected little change in the way that people 
lived in China. There were a number of reasons 


72 


GUNPOWDER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 73 


for this: one was that the Chinese had a religion 
which taught that the people should always live 
in the way their ancestors did. 

Now let us see about gunpowder. It is com¬ 
posed of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulphur, 
and charcoal. The Chinese, as we have just 
been saying, had been making gunpowder for 
hundreds of years, but they used it only for 
fireworks. They loved to set of? firecrackers 
and enjoyed the loud noise they made. But in 
Europe gunpowder was used for a very different 
purpose. As we all know, when a spark is 
applied to gunpowder, it explodes with terrific 
force. In Europe this force was harnessed for 
shooting balls of iron out of cannon and balls 
of lead out of guns. 

In the Middle Ages the common people in 
many countries had few rights. They were al¬ 
most slaves. The good things of life, such as 
there were then, were enjoyed by a few fortu¬ 
nate people called nobles. The rest of the peo¬ 
ple lived in terrible poverty and ignorance. 


Who invented 
gunpowder? 


74 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How did 
gunpowder 
change things? 


The nobles lived in castles with thick stone 
walls and ditches around them filled with 
water. These great nobles were constantly 
fighting among themselves; and sometimes, led 
by their king, they fought against the king and 
nobles of some neighboring country. The 
soldiers were mostly men called knights, in the 
service of the nobles. The knights (on horse¬ 
back) wore suits of shining armor made of iron 
and steel, which were a good protection against 
the weapons of those days, such as pikes, spears, 
battleaxes, and arrows. In great wars, of course, 
many of the common people had to fight, and 
they were at the mercy of the nobles in their 
great castles and the knights in armor. 

Gunpowder changed all this. For cannon, 
shooting heavy iron balls, could batter down 
the thickest castle walls; and the common man 
when he went to war, armed with a gun, could 
shoot right through the armor of the proud 
knights. This made the ordinary people a great 
deal more important than they had been before. 


GUNPOWDER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 75 


Furthermore, the people who lived in cities 
did not need any longer to build great high 
walls of stone around them, within which they 
were cooped up. Stone walls were no protec¬ 
tion against cannon; for defending themselves 
they now depended upon more and better guns 
than their enemies had. So the ugly walls 
around cities were torn down, and the cities 
could spread out and grow, giving everybody 
more room and becoming more healthful places 
in which to live. 

Gunpowder has been useful in peace, as 
well. With explosives men could blast rock 
in quarries for building purposes, farmers could 
blow up stumps of trees that interfered with 
plowing, and engineers could cut tunnels for 
railroads through the midst of great mountains. 

Meanwhile, the other great invention, the 
printing press, was doing its part to bring the 
modern world into life. 

As we have seen, the Chinese had long been 
familiar with the art of printing, but had made 


Has gunpowder 
peace-time 
uses? 


76 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who were the 
first people to 
use printing? 


little out of it. The idea out of which printing 
sprang is so simple that we wonder why people 
like the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans 
did not invent printing presses. These peoples 
had signet rings, and they knew that by smear¬ 
ing some black substance on a signet ring they 
could make an impression of the pattern or 
design. The Greeks, and the Romans, too, 
knew how to stamp pictures and words on 
coins. But they never invented printing. Why 
this was so, we shall see a little later. 

The Chinese method of printing, for hun¬ 
dreds of years, was to engrave on a large wooden 
block a whole page of writing, then spread ink 
over it, and press it down on a sheet of paper. 
After the necessary number of pages had been 
printed, they could be put together into a book; 
and, of course, there could be as many copies 
of the book as there were copies of each page 
printed. When a whole page was engraved 
on one block, the type was of no use afterwards 
for printing other books. In about the eleventh 


GUNPOWDER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 77 


century, however, the Chinese began making 
separate types. They were molded out of a 
kind of earthenware called terra cotta. 

But Chinese printing was slow and expensive, why did not 
because the Chinese have no alphabet. Every the chinese 

, . . . r . . develop printing? 

word is written with a separate picture-sign, of 
which there are about 40,000 in use. You can 
see how terribly troublesome it must be for a 
printer to have to search through 40,000 pieces 
of type to find the right one for each word. 

The different countries of Europe, on the 
other hand, all had alphabets of about two 
dozen letters, each letter representing a sound. 

Using a simple alphabet, it would be quite easy 
to pick out the type necessary for printing a 
book. Then, when the book was printed, the 
type could be used over again for other books, 
the type being kept in trays, with a separate 
compartment for each letter. 

One great reason why the people of Europe 
did not learn the art of printing sooner was be¬ 
cause they had no paper. Even the Romans had 


The Chinese found a 
way to ma\e type 




78 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
paper? 


to do most of their writing with a sharp-pointed 
instrument called a stylus on waxed tablets. 
Important writing was done on polished skins 
called parchment and vellum, which were 
extremely expensive. 

The Chinese, again, knew how to make 
paper. Paper is made from vegetable fibers 
ground into a pulp and then flattened out under 
great pressure. The art of paper-making had 
to come to Europe before printing would be 
worth while. And that is what actually hap¬ 
pened. It was the Mohammedans who brought 
paper into Europe, by way of Persia and Arabia. 
After they conquered Spain, they began making 
paper in that country. Before the year 1400, 
there were paper mills in France, England, and 
Germany. 

Printing began in Europe in a very small 
way. First, the scribes who made the costly 
hand-written books called manuscripts began 
to print the large, artistic initial letters from 
engraved wooden blocks. Some people think 


GUNPOWDER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 79 


that between 1420 and 1446 a man named 
Laurens Coster, who lived in the town of Haar¬ 
lem, in Holland, began to make type and to 
print books. But we cannot find any copies 
of his books, if he did print any; so we are not 
sure that he was the first printer. 

But we do know that about the year 1438, 
in the city of Strasbourg, on the Rhine, a man 
by the name of John Gutenberg built a small 
printing press. It was merely a little wooden 
stand on which the type was set up, inked, and 
pressed down on sheets of paper. 

About 1450, Gutenberg moved to another 
city not far away, called Mainz, or Mayence. 
Gutenberg was poor, but he entered into a 
partnership with a wealthy man named Faust, 
who furnished the money to enable Gutenberg 
to begin printing books. Gutenberg then began 
to make books. They were very beautiful ones, 
and many of them are still in existence. One 
of the first books printed by Gutenberg was 
the Holy Bible. Copies of the Gutenberg Bible 


Who was 
first \now 
printer? 


80 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What did the 
printing 
press do? 


are now worth thousands of dollars. One of 
them was recently purchased by the United 
States government for the Library of Congress. 

In a short time after Gutenberg began print¬ 
ing books, other printing presses sprang up all 
over Europe. A man named William Caxton 
established the first printing press in England, 
near London, in 1474. 

The printing press did more to spread knowl¬ 
edge among the people than did any other 
invention. With that knowledge, men began 
to learn more of Nature’s secrets so as to make 
life more worth-while than it had ever been 
before. And the spread of knowledge helped 
to prepare the people for self-government. 

Of course, great improvements have been 
made in the printing press since Gutenberg’s 
time. Nowadays printing presses are immense 
machines of iron and steel, run by electricity. 
Even the type-setting is no longer done by hand, 
but by wonderful machines such as the lino¬ 
type and monotype. 


Chapter VIII 


THE WONDERS OF STEAM 


G UNPOWDER and the printing press 
alone did not make the sort of world 
that we live in today. It was the invention of 
the steam engine that first gave man the power 
to harness a great force of Nature and put it 
to work for him. Before the day of the steam 
engine practically all the work of the world 
was done by the muscles of men and of animals 
such as horses and oxen. This invention gave 
to man great iron muscles—muscles that never 
grew tired—for doing all kinds of work. 

The steam engine was a slave, but a cheerful, 
willing slave. All it asked was food and drink 
—a certain amount of coal and water daily. 

Steam is simply water heated until it becomes 
a gas. When water in a pot or kettle is heated 
over a fire, the water slowly begins to change 


What good 
is power? 


81 


82 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


to steam, which rises to the surface in little 
bubbles and escapes into the air. We say that 
the water is boiling. When the steam strikes 
the air, it is cooled again and condensed into 
vapor; that is, little particles of water floating 
in the air and looking like a small white cloud. 

Now, steam is different from water, in that 
it is what we call expansive. In other words, 
it spreads out with great force. If a kettle of 
boiling water is covered and no place left for 
the steam to escape, the lid will be blown 
violently off. . This is the force that makes the 
steam engine work. 

The power of steam had been known for 
many hundreds of years before any real use 
began to be made of it. An ancient Greek 
named Hero, who lived in Alexandria, a great 
city of Egypt, more than one hundred years 
before the time of Christ, made a sort of steam 
engine, but it was little more than a plaything. 

Hero’s engine was a metal globe set on a 
covered basin with which it was connected by 


THE WONDERS OF STEAM 


83 


tubes on each side. At the top and at the 

bottom of the globe there was a short bent tube, 

open at the end. The basin was filled with who made the 

water and a fire lighted under it. When the fin*/team 

water began to boil, the steam rushed up into 

the globe and burst out into the air through the 

open tubes with great force, making the globe 

revolve, something like a lawn sprinkler. 

In the seventeenth century, when the great 
discoveries of Galileo awoke a widespread inter¬ 
est in science, a number of men tackled the 
problem of making a steam engine that would 
do useful work. An Italian named Porta con¬ 
structed a curious little engine that would pump 
water from a tank by forcing steam into the 
tank. A little later another Italian named 
Branca made a machine that would turn a wheel 
by blowing a jet of steam on blades around 
the rim. 

At the end of this century, an Englishman, 

Thomas Savery, brought forth an engine which 
developed power by means of steam and 


84 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
the piston? 


air pressure from the outside operating on a 
vacuum (a place from which the air has been 
mostly removed). The vacuum was created 
by sending steam into a receptacle and then 
condensing it into water. Savery’s engine was 
able to pump water up from a mine or a well. 
But it was not used much, because it required 
an enormous amount of fuel. 

Early in the eighteenth century, another 
Englishman, named Newcomen, working with 
Savery and a third man, built a steam engine 
which made use of a piston, a device that had 
been invented by a French scientist named 
Papin and used by him in a little engine. 
Papin’s engine, because it was very awkwardly 
constructed, was not a success. Newcomen’s 
engine was not much of a success, either, but 
the piston was the key which, in the hands of 
another man, was destined to unlock the power 
of steam. 

We shall see now how this happened. New¬ 
comen’s engine was a peculiar one. A piston 


THE WONDERS OF STEAM 


85 


is simply a little disk of metal on a rod, the 
disc fitting snugly into the inside of a hollow 
metal cylinder. In Newcomen’s engine the 
cylinder was filled with steam and then cold 
water was let into the cylinder, which made the 
steam condense and form a vacuum. Then a 
heavy pressure would be exerted on the piston 
by the pressure of the air on the outside, so that 
the piston would be pushed down very vigor¬ 
ously. Then it would be pulled up by means 
of a weight, and the operation repeated over 
again, as first steam and then water were let 
into the cylinder. So it was really the air 
pressure and not steam directly that moved the 
piston. 

In order to work Newcomen’s engine it was 
necessary to turn a number of stop-cocks so as 
to open and shut the valves. A little boy named 
Humphrey Potter was hired to tend the stop¬ 
cocks on one of these engines. He got tired of 
the job and wanted to go off and play. Being 
a bright boy, he fixed up some strings so that 


How did 
Newcomens 
engine wor\? 

















86 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was 
wrong with it? 


the engine would turn the stop-cocks itself. 
That was a valuable improvement. 

When the piston on Newcomen’s engine 
moved down, it set in motion a large beam 
which was attached to a pump-rod. The engine 
could make twelve strokes of the piston in a 
minute, each stroke being capable of lifting 
fifty gallons of water a distance of fifty yards. 
The Newcomen engine was more useful than 
Savery’s, and engines of this type were used 
rather extensively for pumping water out of 
English mines, especially the coal mines. 

But even the Newcomen engine was very 
expensive and wasteful. It used twenty-eight 
pounds of coal each hour for every horse power 
(a horse power is the unit of measurement of 
the work done by steam engines), whereas later 
types of steam engines used only two pounds 
of coal hourly per horse power. A large New¬ 
comen engine burned up $15,000 worth of coal 
in a year. The result was that it did not pay 
to use the engines beyond a certain point. A 


THE WONDERS OF STEAM 


87 


better engine was needed badly, and when a 
real need for anything exists, somebody gen¬ 
erally comes along and supplies it. 

That is what happened. A young Scotch¬ 
man named James Watt made the improve¬ 
ments which have earned for him the title, 
“Father of the Steam Engine.” For the steam 
engine that was destined to give birth to a new 
era in industry was born in the ingenious mind 
of James Watt. 

He was employed as a mechanic by the 
University of Glasgow, his job being the mak¬ 
ing and repairing of mechanical instruments 
used in the university’s laboratories. 

In 1763 (thirteen years before the Declaration 
of Independence was signed in America), a 
small Newcomen engine, the property of the 
university, got out of order. It had been sent 
to London for repairs, but the mechanics there 
had been unable to put it in working order. 
So it was turned over to young Watt. 

Watt was a very thoughtful and painstaking 


Who invented 
the first practical 
steam engine? 


88 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


How did 
Watt’s engine 
wor\? 


young man. He did not just tinker with the 
Newcomen engine. No, he first sat down and 
made a thorough study of the whole subject 
of steam and mechanics. Then he began to 
examine the engine very carefully and to make 
himself thoroughly familiar with it. 

He saw that there was a great waste of time 
and energy in forcing cold water into the cyl¬ 
inder in order to condense the steam and then 
depend upon the pressure of outside air to force 
the piston down. Why not, he asked himself, 
use steam instead of air to work the piston? 

There were many other problems that he 
had to solve. For nineteen years he worked 
over his steam engine. At last he was satisfied, 
and in 1782 he patented his engine. 

In the steam engine, as finally perfected by 
Watt, steam was forced first against one side 
and then against the other side of the piston, 
pushing it back and forth continuously. Fur¬ 
thermore, Watt, like a good Scotchman, got 
every ounce of work that he could out of his 


THE WONDERS OF STEAM 


89 


steam. He put in a valve so that the supply 
of steam going into the cylinder was cut off 
when the piston had made only about one- 
quarter of the stroke, for he knew that the 
steam, after it got into the cylinder, would go 
on expanding sufficiently to drive the piston 
all the way. Thus he more than doubled the 
amount of work that steam would do. 

In short, James Watt, although indebted to 
other men for some of the ideas on which he 
built, is the real creator of the steam engine. 

Watt’s steam engine had unlimited possi¬ 
bilities. It was not just a contrivance for pump¬ 
ing water out of coal mines. People soon 
realized that it could be made to do all kinds 
of other work. Before long it was harnessed 
up to spinning and weaving machines, and 
great mills and factories began springing up all 
over Great Britain. 

Early in the nineteenth century an American 
named Robert Fulton fitted a steam engine into 
a little boat, which sailed up the Hudson River 


What was 
Watt’s engine 
used for? 


90 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who built the 
first steam 
locomotive? 


without the help of sails or oars. A little later 
an Englishman named George Stephenson 
built the first steam locomotive for pulling 
carriages on rails, and soon in many countries 
railroads were bringing towns and cities much 
nearer to each other. 

Of course, as time went on, further improve¬ 
ments were made in the steam engine. A way 
was found for making the steam do still more 
work by forcing it into other cylinders after it 
pushed the piston in the first one. These were 
called “double expansion” and “triple expan¬ 
sion” engines. They made a great saving in the 
amount of coal that had to be used. 

A more recent form of steam engine, and 
a very powerful one, is the turbine, which 
operates by throwing jets of steam against 
bladed wheels. This is the idea that the Italian, 
Branca, experimented with over 300 years ago. 
The modern turbine engine came into use in 
1884. Many of our great ocean liners are driven 
by turbine engines. 


It sailed up the Hudson 
River without the help of 
sails or oars 



















Chapter IX 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 

P EOPLE are often frightened by the terrific 
power that runs wild in a bolt of lightning. 
When it hits a building it does fearful damage, 
and once in a great while it kills someone 
without a moment’s warning. Yet the same 
power, when produced by man and properly 
harnessed and directed, is the most useful ser¬ 
vant that man has today. It does many more 
things for him than steam can do. Not only 
does it run engines; it lights his home, it carries 
his voice across continents and oceans, and it 
even brings him wonderful music from far 
away. We call this great power electricity . 

We know just what steam is; we know that 
it is simply water heated until it becomes a gas. 
Nobody knows what electricity is; it cannot 
be seen or handled or weighed. But man has 


What is 
lightning? 


91 


92 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who coined 
the word 
electricity? 


learned to control it and to put it to work for 
him in many different ways. 

The ancient Greeks, 2500 years ago, noticed 
the strange fact that a piece of amber, or of 
certain other substances, when rubbed briskly 
caused tiny bits of light material, such as cloth, 
if held near, to jump to it and cling there. But 
nobody had any idea that the mysterious power 
that made the bit of cloth jump to the amber 
was the same as that which threw the mighty 
lightning bolts across the sky. 

It was not until the seventeenth century, 
about 300 years ago, that men tried to learn 
more about electricity by actual experiment. 
An Englishman, Sir Thomas Browne, coined 
the word electricity; we first find it in a book 
that he published in 1646. 

In the eighteenth century real progress began 
to be made. It was found that some objects 
will give off electricity, while others will not, 
also that electricity can be passed from one 
object to another. 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 


93 


About 1745, a strange kind of bottle called 
the Leyden jar aroused a great deal of interest 
among people in Europe and in America. A 
man named Cunaeus, while visiting a friend’s 
laboratory in the city of Leyden, in Holland, 
happened to pick up a bottle of water in which 
an electrically charged wire was dipping, and 
with his other hand touched the wire. He got 
a violent “shock.” Later, it was found that the 
same effect could be brought about by using an 
empty bottle coated with tinfoil on both the 
outside and the inside and then charged with 
electricity. 

The Leyden jar attracted the attention of 
Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest Ameri¬ 
cans that ever lived. He studied the problem 
and showed just how the “shock” was caused. 
By connecting a number of Leyden jars one to 
another he was able to produce a “shock” of 
such great force that it nearly killed him. 

Now a number of men began to think that 
perhaps the force that nearly knocked them 


What was a 
Leyden jar? 


94 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What was 
Franklin's 
experiment? 


down when they took hold of a Leyden jar 
might be the same as lightning. 

Franklin decided to find out by experiment 
whether this was true or not by trying to bring 
down some of the lightning from the sky and 
bottle it up in a Leyden jar. It was a dangerous 
experiment, for lightning is not something that 
can be played with safely. 

At last the day for the great experiment 
arrived. During a thunderstorm Franklin and 
his young son, standing under a shed, sent a 
large kite up into the clouds. To the end of 
the long cord holding the kite he had attached 
a metal key. Franklin held the cord by a silk 
ribbon, silk being what is called a non-conduc¬ 
tor; that is, electricity does not pass through it. 
As the lightning flashed up in the sky, Franklin 
noticed that the fibers of the cord began to 
bristle, like a cat’s fur. He cautiously touched 
his knuckles to the key. Presto! a spark jumped 
from the key into his hand. Filled with excite¬ 
ment, he brought together the key and the 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 


95 


Leyden jar. The Leyden jar was immediately 
electrified and acted in the same way as when 
it was charged with electricity produced by 
rubbing. What a beautiful experiment it was! 

A direct result of Franklin’s experiment was 
the invention of the lightning rod, which 
farmers put up on the roofs of their houses 
and barns. These tall rods act as protection 
against lightning bolts. 

We may say that electricity, as a great servant 
of mankind, really was born in 1800, when an 
Italian named Volta invented the first electric 
storage battery, producing a continuous current 
of electricity. The battery consisted of a pile 
of metal discs, first one of copper and then one 
of zinc, with a piece of cloth, moistened in acid, 
between them. The electric battery created 
great excitement. 

The next great step in harnessing electricity 
was made by a Dane named Oersted. While 
experimenting with a compass needle and a 
wire charged with electricity he noticed some 


Franklin sent a large 
bite up into the clouds 


Who invented 
the first 
battery? 



96 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
the electro¬ 
magnet? 


unusual effects. The needle behaved very 
strangely. He saw that there was a close rela¬ 
tionship between magnetism and electricity. 
In 1820 he announced to the world his great 
discovery. 

This discovery led to the invention of the 
electromagnet. This was one of the most amaz¬ 
ing inventions ever made by man. The electro¬ 
magnet consisted of an iron magnet with a 
wire wound around it. By winding the wire 
in a certain way, the magnet was made to spin 
around as long as the current lasted. 

It was on Christmas day, in the year 1821, 
that a young Englishman named Michael Fara¬ 
day put into operation his electromagnet. Fara¬ 
day was the son of a blacksmith and had started 
out in life as a London newsboy. He educated 
himself and became an assistant in the labora¬ 
tory of the great scientist, Sir Humphrey Davy. 
The story of his life and work reads like a won¬ 
derful fairytale. 

Thus was electricity harnessed so that it 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 97 

was made to do actual work. Electric motors 
of greater and greater power were developed 
for running all sorts of engines, operating street- what is a 
cars, and the like. An electric motor is much dynamo? 
the same as an electric dynamo. A dynamo is 
a machine for producing electric current, while 
the motor is a machine that receives a current 
and produces mechanical power. The wire 
coils are wound somewhat differently. 

We now come to another wonderful inven¬ 
tion. A wire was wound around a small iron 
bar, and whenever an electric current was sent 
through the wire the bar became magnetized. 

By turning the current on and then off, the bar 
would attract and then release another little 
piece of iron placed near it, making a clicking 
sound as it did so. In this way it was possible 
to send signals over a wire for long distances. 

A man sitting at one end of the wire would 
work a little key up and down, turning the 
current on and then off, and the instrument 
at the other end of the line would respond. 


98 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who built the 
first telegraph? 


It was an American, Samuel F. B. Morse, 
who built the first telegraph line. It was three 
miles long. By combining short and long 
clicks, called dots and dashes, he was able to 
make a different signal for each letter of the 
alphabet. His experiment was so successful 
that Congress gave him the sum of $30,000 with 
which to construct a telegraph line from Balti¬ 
more, Maryland, to Washington, D. C., and 
in 1844 the first telegram was sent over the 
wire from one city to another. 

Then people began to wonder if a telegraph 
line could not be laid under the ocean to con¬ 
nect America and Europe. That was a daring 
idea. Think of it, a wire 3,000 miles long, 
resting on the bottom of the ocean! Further¬ 
more, the wire would have to be placed in a 
thick rubber covering to keep the electricity 
from escaping into the water. 

A man named Cyrus W. Field worked for 
many years at great expense in an attempt to 
lay such a cable between the two continents. 



Cyrus W. Field worked for years trying to lay a 
cable between America and Europe 
99 


100 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
the telephone? 


In the year 1858, he succeeded in making the 
connection, but the cable broke. Then the Civil 
War came along and operations had to be 
stopped. But after the war, Mr. Field went 
ahead again, and in 1866 the United States and 
England began talking with each other across 
the ocean. 

If messages could be sent at lightning speed 
over telegraph wires, might it not be possible 
to send the human voice itself over the wires? 
That was the most daring idea that had oc¬ 
curred to any inventor up to that time. Prob¬ 
ably no inventor ever faced more discourage¬ 
ment and ridicule than did Alexander Graham 
Bell, the inventor of the telephone. People 
thought he was crazy; even after success was 
in his grasp he was laughed at as “a crank who 
says he can talk through a wire.” 

Mr. Bell was not even a scientist. He was 
a teacher in a school for deaf and dumb chil¬ 
dren! But this work had led him to make a 
careful study of the human ear to find out 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 


101 


how it carried sounds to the brain, for it is in 
the brain that we hear sounds. What he dis¬ 
covered made him feel sure that the telephone 
was a possibility. 

He set to work to make an artificial eardrum 
out of a thin disc of metal. By talking upon 
this disc, he made it vibrate a piece of iron 
connected with an electromagnet. Then he 
connected, with a long piece of wire, this electro¬ 
magnet with another to which was attached a 
similar disc. One was the transmitter, and the 
other the receiver. When he talked into the 
transmitter, the vibrations of the disc made 
changes in the electric current, and as the cur¬ 
rent reached the other end it made the disc 
at that end vibrate in the same way as the 
first disc. And when these vibrations struck 
the eardrum of the person holding the receiver, 
he heard sounds—the sounds made by the per¬ 
son talking at the other end of the wire. 

This sounds very simple as we tell about it 
now. But it was only after long and patient 


How does 

telephone 

wor\? 


102 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who discovered 
"wireless?” 


experimenting that success crowned Bell’s ef¬ 
forts. At the great exposition held in Phila¬ 
delphia to celebrate the one hundredth anni¬ 
versary of the Declaration of Independence, 
Bell gave a public demonstration of the tele¬ 
phone. Today there are millions in use 
throughout this and other countries. 

But greater wonders were still in store. It 
was known that electricity sends waves out into 
space that travel with the speed of light. A 
man named Heinrich Hertz, in Germany, in¬ 
vented an “eye” that would catch these waves, 
but it was a young Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, 
who made the wonderful instruments with 
which messages could be sent through the air, 
without wires, over great distances. 

The latest result of harnessing the lightning 
is the wonderful radio that fills our homes with 
music, and enables the President, sitting in the 
White House, to talk to the whole nation. 

The radio is simply a wireless telephone. 
The transmitter is the microphone; the receiver 


HARNESSING THE LIGHTNING 


103 


is a little glass bulb, called the audion. Inside 
of it there is a vacuum and a metal filament 
which is made to glow by the current from a 
small electric battery. The audion was in¬ 
vented by a young American, Lee de Forest, 
who, after finishing a course in electrical re¬ 
search at Yale University, went to work for the 
Western Electric Company in Chicago, and at 
night, in his room, carried on experiments with 
the mysterious electric waves. 

Meanwhile, the electricity had been har¬ 
nessed to do another beneficial job for man. It 
was made to light his homes and schools, his 
stores and factories and other buildings, and 
his public streets. 

This first electric light was the arc light. Two 
sticks of carbon were set close together and an 
electric current forced to leap from one to the 
other, the resistance of the air making the car¬ 
bons glow. But the light was too intense and 
glaring for ordinary use indoors, though fairly 
satisfactory outdoors. 


Who made 
the first 
audion tubes? 


104 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


Who invented 
the incandescent 
light? 


Thomas A. Edison, one of the world’s great¬ 
est inventors, succeeded, after many years of 
hard work, in making an electric light that 
would serve all common purposes. At last, he 
gave to the world the incandescent lamp. 

It was almost by accident that he hit upon 
the solution of the problem. He sealed a thread 
of carbon into a glass bulb from which the air 
had been pumped out. Then he turned on the 
electric current. The carbon gave off a beau¬ 
tiful, soft light. The electric current could be 
made to light many of his lamps; it could be 
divided into as small units as were desired. 
This was not the case with the arc lamp. 

The first commercial electric lighting plant 
was installed on the steamship Columbia, in 
May, 1880. Great improvements, of course, 
have been made in the electric light since then. 
There are lamps of all sizes and degrees of 
brightness. What a dreary world this would 
be without the electric light! 


Edison gave to the world 
the incandescent lamp 


















Chapter X 


THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE 
AIRPLANE 

S TEAM ENGINES and electric motors 
gave mankind power-machines that have 
changed the world tremendously, and have al¬ 
lowed people more leisure than they have ever 
had before. At the same time, such inven¬ 
tions have enabled them to produce hundreds 
of times more goods. 

But steam engines and electric motors would 
not have made possible the wonderful devel¬ 
opment of the automobile, and they would be 
absolutely useless for airplanes. The trouble 
with steam engines is that they are terribly 
heavy, and in order to make steam a fire has 
to be kept burning beneath the boiler. Electric 
motors, also, are heavy and they have to be 
connected with dynamos in a power station so 
that they may have a continuous supply of 


Why do autos 
need a different 
sort of engine? 


105 


106 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


What is the 
ancestor of the 
gas engine? 


strong current. To be sure, a certain amount 
of electricity can be produced by storage bat¬ 
teries, but not very much, and the batteries 
have to be recharged often. 

Both automobiles and airplanes, in order to 
run for long distances at great speed, require 
very light engines of high power, and a cheap 
fuel. There is only one engine that meets these 
requirements, and that is the gas engine. The 
gas engine, like the steam engine and the elec¬ 
tric motor, had a long history, but it is only 
within recent years, with the birth of the auto¬ 
mobile and of the airplane, that it has become 
an invention of the utmost importance. 

Strange as it may seem, the earliest ancestor 
of the gas engine is the cannon, which sprang 
from the invention of gunpowder! For the gas 
engine gets its power from sudden explosions. 
Of course, in the gas engine the substance ex¬ 
ploded is not gunpowder—it is a mixture of 
gas and air; and, instead of a cannon-ball, there 
is a piston in the engine. 


THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE AIRPLANE 107 


As early as the seventeenth century, engines 
were actually made which got their power from 
explosions of gunpowder. But these were such 
dangerous machines that the idea was given up. 
It was not until the discovery of coal gas, some 
years after Watt invented his steam engine, 
that a real gas engine was built, by an English¬ 
man named John Barber. A mixture of gas and 
air was let into a tank; on being fired, it shot 
out against the blades of a paddle wheel, mak¬ 
ing the wheel rotate with great force. 

Some time later, a French engineer named 
Lebon invented the scheme of compressing a 
mixture of air and gas and igniting it by an 
electric spark. This was a great step forward. 
In i860, another Frenchman, Lenoir, built the 
first really useful gas engine, which was still 
further improved in 1876 when Otto and Lan- 
gen, in Germany, invented the four-cycle en¬ 
gine, in which there were four strokes of the 
piston to each explosion, the gas and air being 
let into a cylinder. This is the way modern 


Who built 
the first 
gas engine? 


108 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


When was the 
first automobile 
made? 


gas engines work. High-powered automobiles 
have gas engines with a number of cylinders. 
A gas engine can get twice as much work as 
a steam engine out of the same quantity of fuel. 

Meanwhile, efforts were being made to build 
“horseless carriages” with steam engines. Of 
course, they were failures. It was not until 
1894 that the modern automobile, using gaso¬ 
line for fuel, was born. The gasoline, evapo¬ 
rating, makes a gas which is exploded by an 
electric spark plug. 

There were many difficult problems to solve 
before the automobile became the useful ser¬ 
vant of man that it is today. Most of the early 
automobiles were more trouble than they were 
worth. The engines were always getting out of 
order, making the cars “go dead” many miles 
away from a repair shop. 

But now all that is changed. Automobiles 
fitted with engines of tremendous power run 
smoothly and swiftly over splendid roads. In 
the United States alone there are some twenty- 


THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE AIRPLANE 109 


five million automobiles in use, and the country 
has been covered with a network of wide roads 
for them to travel on. Great motor trucks carry 
all kinds of merchandise, and motor buses fur¬ 
nish cheap transportation between towns and 
take the country children to and from fine cen¬ 
tral schoolhouses. 

While all this was going on, men were trying 
to solve the age-old problem of flight through 
the air. Ever since man has lived on the earth 
he has envied the birds, because they could do 
easily and naturally something that he could 
not; they could fly. For hundreds of years, 
man’s attempts to fly all ended in dismal and 
often tragic failure. 

It was thought that the key to the problem 
had been found when the balloon was invented. 
It was in 1783 that the first successful flight 
through the air by balloon was made. 

The first balloons were filled with hot air, 
which, being lighter than cool air, rises above 
it. Later balloons were filled with hydrogen, 


I 


When did man 
first fly in 
the air? 


110 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


a very light gas. These balloons were big, 
round bags of oiled silk. But balloons could 
not be guided. 

From balloons there gradually developed 
dirigible airships; that is, airships that can be 
steered. The gas bags of these airships were 
shaped like cigars. Santos-Dumont, of Brazil, 
flew such an airship around the Eiffel Tower, 
in Paris, in the year 1901. Count Zeppelin, of 
Germany, made improvements in the dirigible 
and built a new model of the kind now known 
as Zeppelins. 

The ancestor of the airplane was not the bal¬ 
loon but the kite. The kite is supported in the 
air by the pressure of the wind as it rushes up 
under the flat surface of the kite. The idea was 
put to practical use in gliders. A glider is a sort 
of airplane without any motor. The pilot gets 
into a glider, launches off from a high place, 
and coasts slowly to earth. 

The first successful airplane was invented by 
two American young men; they were brothers, 



The first successful airplane 
was invented by two 
Americans 










THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE AIRPLANE 111 


named Orville and Wilbur Wright. When 
they were little boys they became interested in 
flying. They read everything that they could 
find on the subject, particularly about the glid¬ 
ers that were being experimented with in Ger¬ 
many. Finally they built a glider themselves, 
and during several summers they made tests 
with it among the North Carolina sand dunes. 

Their problem was how to control the glider, 
how to steer it, and how to keep it from being 
turned over by the wind. After years of patient 
work they learned how to construct a machine 
that they could control perfectly, and that 
needed only a suitable motor. 

Finally, they found the right motor, and the 
first real airplane was born. The machine had 
two planes, and it was kept in balance by skillful 
twisting of the planes, by means of ropes, to 
adjust them to the changing air-currents. The 
little craft weighed only slightly more than 200 
pounds, and it was run by a four-cylinder gaso¬ 
line motor of sixteen horsepower. 


Who invented 

mechanical 

flight? 


112 


THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 


When was the 
first mechanical 
flight made? 


On December 17,1903, at a lonely place near 
Kitty Hawk, along the sandy shores of North 
Carolina, the brothers first tested their airplane. 
Four successful flights were made. It was the 
first time in history that real flight had been 
achieved by mechanical power. 

Man at last had conquered the air; he had 
grown wings and could use them as birds could. 
We have not space to tell about the develop¬ 
ment of the airplane since then; how it was im¬ 
proved, made larger, fitted with more powerful 
motors and propellers, and its speed increased 
until it could leave behind the fastest trains. 

A few years ago a brave young man named 
Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to 
Paris, without stopping, in a little more than 
thirty-three hours, at an average speed of 108 
miles an hour. Another daring American, 
Admiral Byrd, has flown over both the North 
Pole and the South Pole. 

And the airplane is as yet only in the child¬ 
hood of its usefulness to man. 



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